Acknowledgments
I was born at an early age....
What might have been seen as precocity in the first half of my life has evolved into a certain independence in this half. Here I want to give tribute to some of the key players in bringing this book to fruition.
From my mother, I inherited a drive for improvement, and from my father, hard work as the proper and justifying role of man. I met my wife when I was fourteen, and was blown away by her wise and serious essay on the stages of life, read by her to our English III class in high school. Now past our fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, she has been the tether that keeps me connected to those most important things in life. Five years after our first meeting, we had our first daughter Kris, while I was finishing my senior year in college.
All of my five children grew up inside the business that evolved to deliver this book. Kris managed the operations side of the business during some of the most explosive growth we ever experienced. Beth, even as a pre-teen, was helping with keeping those rows and columns straight, in the days when we did manual tabulation of survey data. Later, she and I set a personal record of 130 respondents recruited and interviewed in one hectic day in Santa Monica.
Jon is the philosopher-musician-writer who helped me begin contributing reports and articles to the marketing research press. This work laid the foundations of this book, helping me to think through some of the issues covered here. James is the right hand that built Sorensen Associates, “The in-store research company®,” which the world has come to know. He is the one who transmuted my scientific curiosity into something of practical value for our clientele, which has swelled under his ministrations.
Paul is an award-winning nuclear physicist who wrote the software for our TURF analysis (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency). We continue to use the procedures he developed for shopper flow analysis in our PathTracker® Tool Suite.
Beyond the core of my family, the towering influence from my early professional years was Lloyd Ingraham, my major professor at the University of California at Davis. His was an open and searching mind that encouraged the same for me. What an incredible experience, to be given free range and funding to follow my nose into nuclear quadrupole resonance, chick embryo metabolism, the quantum chemistry of small ring heterocycles, the role of thiamine in muscular dystrophy, and radiocarbon and dendrochronology, all resulting in peer-reviewed scientific papers in one three-year period.
Leaping forward nearly 30 years found me with an eclectic history encompassing university faculty positions, board-certified clinical chemistry, which evolved through a food laboratory and sensory science to market research. The logical connection through all this is curiosity.
In 2000, three things converged: my long-standing curiosity about the overall movement of shoppers through stores, my acquaintance with Peter Fader at Wharton, and client support by Sandy Swan at Dr. Pepper/7UP for an initiative to conduct the study. Although a few others followed, it was Sandy’s immediate financial encouragement that launched PathTracker®, the most extensive study of shopper paths (and much more) ever conducted. Sandy was with me on the early work when the insights were accumulating, but the knowledge of how to use the insights profitably was slow to coalesce.
And then, Peter Fader’s immediate and enthusiastic support for the project rendered the objective, academic imprimatur that I valued more than the money. His practical views on the relation of online and offline retailing are covered in our interview in Chapter 4, “Integrating Online and Offline Retailing: An Interview with Professors Peter Fader (The Wharton School) and Wendy Moe (University of Maryland).”
Mike Twitty of Unilever was another major influence. Mike and I both participated in the first IIR Shopper Insights Conference (2001), and I recognized early on that Mike was a serious student of the shopper. Mike Twitty has had the “quick trip” as a focus for several years, and my own overwhelming data forced me to recognize the unclaimed potential in this area. Mike is making a tremendous contribution to the entire industry through the insights he shares from this work in Chapter 7, “The Quick-Trip Paradox: An Interview with Unilever’s Mike Twitty.”
I’ve mentioned the role of curiosity in my career and this book. Science is, of course, another prominent motif. But independence is perhaps as important. Not caring what anyone else thinks is a strength and flaw encouraged by a decade or more of living, like Thoreau, in my own mountain-forest semi-isolation. My independence, however, is tempered by a healthy dose of personal insecurity, which always secretly seeks confirmation and approval. But I am very picky about whose approval and confirmation I care about.
This is the significance of Fader, Twitty; and later of Bill Bean, then at Pepsi; then Mark Heckman, who preceded my shopper tracking work at Marsh—the “Marsh Super Study” in the early ‘90s and now a partner with me in Accelerated Merchandising LLC; and even later of Cliff McGregor of Nestlé; and, finally, Siemon Scammell-Katz of ID Magasin, then at TNS/Kantar. In any budding and exciting field like “shopper,” there are always plenty of thin poseurs. But these folks are genuine gold, having their own independent and advanced expertise in the shopper that I know and care about.
Bill Bean, while at Pepsi, sponsored a study of four supermarkets using the RFID tracking technology, while it was still cutting/bleeding edge. Bill took the raw data from those four stores and did his own independent study, using intelligent agent modeling with Icosystem, which confirmed and went beyond many of the things I was learning myself. (The Wharton group under Fader has also operated independently, following its own curiosity and analytical strengths.)
My professional collaboration with Mark Heckman over the past decade, has deepened considerably. His real-world retailer perspective included years actually incorporating our joint insights into profitable retail practice at Marsh and other retailers. This gave us tools for looking, not only from the outside in on the business, but from the inside looking out. Mark has collaborated extensively on this second edition, including focus on the “The Five Vital Tenets of Active Retailing,” a blueprint for his second chapter in this edition, Transitioning Retailers from Passive to Active Mode.
Siemon Scammell-Katz is the first person I ever met who knew many of the principles and truths that were emerging from PathTracker® but had no prior exposure to the intricacies of our work. His knowledge was a result of having spent more than a decade studying shoppers’ behavior on a tenth of a second by tenth of a second basis (fixation by fixation) from point-of-focus eye tracking studies, primarily in Europe. Siemon’s independent work not only served as confirmation, but also stimulated me to a renewed interest in eye tracking, particularly linking the footpath to the eye path.
Finally, Cliff McGregor at Nestlé and I have had many illuminating (to me) discussions. These interested me greatly, initially, because of Cliff’s former participation in the Envirosell organization in Australia before he joined Nestlé. I’ve mentioned in the book my great respect for Paco Underhill’s work, although we have never been connected professionally, other than my reading his books and sitting in his audiences.
Cliff did me the kindness of reading the entire first draft of the first edition and commenting, to my profit, on various features. I spent a very pleasant day in 2007 chatting with Cliff about our mutual views on shoppers. This was very helpful because of my own newness to the global scene and his wide experience of global retailing, as well as a more detailed view into the cultural anthropological approach to studying shoppers. In this sense, Siemon and Cliff, both enhanced my own study and focus by broadening my scope to a bigger, global picture, as well as a more detailed focus on the individual shopper.
In my mind, I have something of an artificial boundary between myself and “my” company, which in reality has been run for quite a few years by my son, James. But at the same time, there is an obvious connection, beyond family. Frankly, I could never have learned what I have about shoppers if I had stayed tethered to our clients’ questions and interests. On the other hand, had the company not focused on those, we wouldn’t exist. It is James and his staff that have mediated the learnings from PathTracker® to the world of our clients. But James has been the stern “client” that always disciplines me with, “So what?” And it has not been an indifferent “So what.” This is why Chapter 10, “Brands, Retailers, and Shoppers: Why the Long Tail Is Wagging the Dog,” is in reality a collaboration between myself, James, Siemon, and Ginger Sack, our senior researcher on the client side.
There was a significant lapse in our focus in the first edition: and that was the lack of attention to the substantial amount of retail focusing on major, and typically, infrequent purchases. James Sorensen, now Executive Vice President, Shopper Insights, at Kantar Retail, has remedied this with his chapter 6, “Long Cycle Purchasing.”
Of course, many at TNS Sorensen played crucial roles in supporting my studies, and I thank them all, but three have been the heavy-lifters in research and development. Dave Albers is the concept and numbers genius that always improved every idea I brought him, Jamin Roth is my database right hand, and Marcus Geroux is the creative talent who does the same with devices, electronics, and anything requiring “making.” I told Marcus once that he must have apprenticed with James Bond’s “Q.” All three have played key roles in one or more of the suite of patents underlying the PathTracker® Tool Suite.
I must mention also my increasing involvement with Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, and many of his staff, but particularly with Svetlana Bogomolova, who joined this second edition team as we were doing the final editing. But in addition to helpful reviewing of the work, added two sidebars in chapter 2, and stimulated very wide thoughts, leading to an Afterward, which is in reality a survey of the research needed going forward. Svetlana, Mark Heckman and I have collaborated in that final work of this second edition.
My sincere thanks to the giants mentioned here, upon whose shoulders I have stood.
I am yet grateful to Laura Mazur and Louella Miles, who spent the better part of a year coaxing and encouraging me in the writing of the first edition, drafting content from my interviews, rewriting and stitching together a vast quilt from the multifarious pieces I had assembled willy-nilly over the years. It was then that Robert Gunther added his creative polish to the first edition. My nephew, Ray Sorensen, a very fine writer in his own right, recently undertook the formidable task of integrating my new work, and that of Mark Heckman and James Sorensen, in moving the content from that appropriate to 2008, to the real world of global retail of 2016, that is, now Convergent Online, Mobile and Bricks (COMB) retail. Of course, I retain all responsibility for the content of the final document, so send any brickbats my way. Kudos to the rest!